Salon.com > David Davis

LeBron James might improve your pension

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

John Montgomery Ward was a pioneering baseball star: In 1880, he became the second pitcher ever to hurl a perfect game. Ward was also a lawyer who was the first to recognize that the reserve clause embedded within each contract bound players to the teams that signed them -- and that gave team owners an enormous, inherent advantage over players that lasted for decades.

"In the enactment of the reserve-rule the clubs were probably influenced by three considerations," wrote Ward in a seminal essay titled "Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?" in 1887. "They wished to make the business of base-ball more permanent, they meant to reduce salaries, and they sought to secure a monopoly of the game."

"Chattel" was entirely appropriate because, for much of the 20th century, baseball players and other professional athletes were among the most exploited labor forces in the United States. Team owners dictated artificially low salaries; benefits (pension, medical care and the like) were inadequate. Athletes did not employ agents nor have an organized, certified union to represent their rights, on and off the field.

When Jews ruled basketball

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:58:00 +0000

BACK WHEN TRACK AND FIELD was a popular spectator sport, my dad used to take me to Madison Square Garden to watch the Millrose Games in the dead of winter. Invariably, he would nudge me and point to an elderly gentleman in black tie standing in the infield.

“There's Abel Kiviat!” he'd exclaim. “Your grandfather knows him. He was the best.”

Kiviat was then in his 80s, a shrunken gnome with bowed legs. In his prime, just before World War I, he was a top-rated distance runner. He held the 1,500-meter world record and took the silver medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

Family lore has it that Kiviat and my grandfather worked as counselors at the same summer camp. Later, as cogs in the judicial system, they would stop and chat in the marbled hallways of the state and federal courthouses.

The connection transcended the personal: Abel Kiviat was a Jew. This was of supreme importance to our family because so few Jewish athletes succeeded at the elite level. Those who did — the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax being the prime example — acquired a distinctive aura. Kiviat and Koufax were the real Chosen Ones, SuperJews, able to whip the Goyim on their AstroTurf.

Marvin Miller

Wed, 08 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Chances are, Marvin Miller didn't receive a thank-you note from Alex Rodriguez last winter after the shortstop signed a 10-year, $252 million contract to play for the Texas Rangers. That's a shame because Rodriguez, the highest-paid athlete in the history of team sports, owes nearly every dollar he banks to Miller.

These days it's impossible for sports fans to wrap their ESPN-addled brains around the concept of underpaid athletes. But in the not-so-distant past, professional athletes were grossly underpaid relative to the enormous revenue their skills generated. Most took second jobs -- selling insurance or cars -- during the off-season. Worse, the teams they played for owned them, quite literally, for life. About the only thing an athlete could do about it was, well, play.

Marvin Miller fought to change that. As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1983, he challenged the assumptions that players are chattel and that labor unions have no place within sports. Going head-to-head with team owners and commissioners, he emerged with victory after victory that benefited the players. Free agency, salary arbitration, pension rights: Miller ensured that players gained workers' rights and were compensated commensurate with their place in the game. By the time he retired, Miller had created one of the most powerful unions -- sports or otherwise -- in America.